Slide leak claims Tegra 2 3D en route from Nvidia

A slide from Nvidia's Mobile World Congress presentation, leaked ahead of the company's presence at the event, has revealed the existence of a new Tegra system-on-chip: the Tegra 2 3D.

The chip is best thought of as a Tegra 2.5, offering an upgrade over the original dual-core design as a stop-gap measure on the way to the rumoured release of a quad-core Tegra 3 design.

The slide, leaked to our friends over at TechEye by an unknown source, claims that the new chip will be based on the same dual-core Cortex-A9 design from British chip giant ARM as the original, clocked at 1.2GHz - offering an overall performance, the slide claims, of 5,520 MIPS (Million Instructions Per Second).

The main selling point of the chip over its predecessor, however, is hinted at in the name: the slide claims that the two Tegra 2 3D SoC designs, T25 and AP25, will represent the world's 'first 3D processor,' and include inbuilt support for 3D displays such as those found in Nintendo's upcoming 3DS console.

While 3D continues to be a hot topic in the world of entertainment, it remains to be seen if people actually want a smartphone that sends them cross-eyed - and, as a result, whether Nvidia would find the integration of 3D display technology enough of a differentiator to convince customers to plump for the new Tegra 2 3D over its precessor.

The slide claims a Spring 2011 launch date for the chip - although commercial implementations could be some time after that, depending on the availability of 3D displays and the general uptake of the chip over vanilla Tegra 2 implementations.

Nvidia has yet to confirm whether the slide is genuine - and some strange graphical anomalies cast doubt on its veracity - but with the Mobile World Congress expo due to kick off early next month, we haven't long to wait to see if the Tegra 2 3D genuinely exists.